News and general opinion, often privacy, security or computer related, but could be about anything really, including religion, politics, the environment, business or audio books. "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

This is a fascinating episode of The World Tomorrow, Julian Assange's TV show on RT. It focuses on the "Occupy" movement and the realisation by today's leaders that nations are no longer in control of their own destiny, and that decisions are not made by elected leaders, but by power structures that would prefer to work behind the scenes. Organisations like the Federal reserve, WTO, IMF and the like operate without any accountability or oversight.The super-rich feel nothing about plundering whole continents for resources, and impoverishing the poor still further. South Africa's ruling elite are no different, except most of them probably don't even realize what is going on. I wonder how much longer the Western "economies" will last?

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

On Friday I went to work for my biggest client, who uses Internet Solutions as their "service" provider. More specifically, they use ISDSL, the ADSL part of the company.On Friday basically nothing was working: you couldn't use Carbonite, DropBox or even Google Search, Google Drive or Gmail. Twitter.com, like most dotcom sites, was inaccessible. It turns out that one of the major undersea cables, SAT3, was either broken or under "maintenance", and a number of ISPs were affected. Why single out Internet Solutions? Because they are the biggest commercial ISP, and at one time they were the best ISP. Sadly no more.As a client we received no notification from ISDSL, and they wouldn't reply to my questions because I'm not on their Technical Support list. Instead, the only public acknowledgement of the problem was on Twitter, but you needed to use a different ISP to see the message.The graphs above show the story pretty well: each graph shows the download speed for several web sites I monitor: www.fishwisepro.com, www.fact-reviews.com, and www.openaccess.co.za. It measures how long an HTML page takes to download. These graphs are the average of all 4 sites. The top graph is for 2 weeks ago, the bottom graph is the past week. They grey area is the weekend. Notice the large dip on Friday, and another on Saturday. Clearly they don't have a backup plan for this kind of disaster.My own ISP, M-Web, also uses the SAT3 cable, along with the SEACOM cable. They suffered downtime some time back, but clearly they have learnt how to deal with this issue. My home ADSL service was totally unaffected. That's how I was able to read the brain-dead tweets from @IS_global. It was imposible to see these tweets from an ISDSL connection. They clearly have no idea what the word "revert" means.

Update Tuesday 3rd July: Duncan Alfers from IS has been in touch, and I have provided him with contact details for my main client, so we can be warned about future problems.